I'm Mike, and welcome to The Inked Tail Newsletter

You've found the newsletter before the newsletter really exists. There's nothing in the archive yet but this. That's on purpose, I'd rather start honest than fake a backlog.

For now I'll give a little background about myself. I'm the author of Tail of the Stray — a dark fantasy following Velrik, a vulpin rogue, from the collar of slavery into the criminal underworld of a city that calls him Aberrant. While I'm an author, it's still more of a hobby than anything. I still work my day job as an environmental scientist, doing my best to make money for my hobbies.

I'm currently working on perfecting the newsletter, getting my author pages set up on various websites like Good Reads and Book Bub, and learning more about marketing and publishing.

What is Tail of the Stray

Well, for me it's the story about a character of mine that I grew attached to while playing D&D. Velrik started out as a min-maxed dexterous rouge that was equally utilitarian as he was deadly. My DM always asks us to come up with some kind of backstory so he can tie things into his custom made world. So I did what any sane D&D player would do, write a 70,000 word backstory. By the way, he didn't bother to read any of it, which was fair. I found out that I like writing and world building after that.

As our campaign continued, I started writing more and coming up with ideas for my own world. I ended up making a world with it's own pantheon, magic lore, cultures, and some local histories. As of today, I have several documents that are all interconnected with lore.

I started posting chapters on Royal Road at first, and it did alright, but I knew I had to make some changes. After a few months of edits and rewrites, I ended up doubling the size of the first book and gaining more viewers. In the end, Royal Road seems to be more suited for LitRPG and Progression Fantasy stories, not Tail of the Stray. However, I want to thank all of my Royal Road readers for sticking with Velrik and myself, especially EstrangedApe and JeSper537. Those two always left great comments on my chapters and even helped me catch some typos. And as you probably guessed, I will be pulling Tail of the Stray from Royal Road. For those of you who came from Royal Road, please send me a message there or from the contact page on my website; I plan on thanking you all for supporting me in the beginning of Velrik's story.

Tail of the Stray has become a project larger than I originally intended. I plan to not only write multiple books for Velrik's story, but also expand on the world by writing stories for other characters that appear in the series.

What can you expect from future newsletters?

Look forward to snippets of scenes I'm writing, exclusive peeks at world lore, detailed histories of events in the world, tips for indie authors, and more. I enjoy sharing what I make, and the fact is that there is a LOT of information that might not show up in the book. So, look forward to some cool stuff.

Thanks for subscribing!

I look forward to sharing more with everyone, and I hope y'all enjoy!
​— Mike Garcia, author and sometimes procrastinator